The syslog-ng newsletter looks odd
Recently I was asked why the syslog-ng newsletter looks odd. At first I did not even understand what is the problem. Then I realized that I kept using the same format for the past 14 years, that was optimized for UNIX terminals :-)
So, what is the problem? 14 years ago I was kindly asked by syslog-ng users to use plain text e-mails instead of HTML formatting. Of course it also means that there is no easy way to emphasize titles in the newsletter. For that I started to use a long list of hyphens under the titles, equal length to the title. It all looks perfect in a terminal window, which has fixed width fonts. It definitely looks odd in a GUI e-mail client, which does not use fixed width fonts. Something like this:
This is a really nice title
---------------------------
The lenght of the line and the title are different. Luckily the mailing list archive also uses a fixed width font when showing e-mails. So, if you take a look at the last syslog-ng newsletter, you will see that it looks completely OK: https://lists.balabit.hu/pipermail/syslog-ng/2024-December/026735.html
So, what is next? My suspicion is that over the past decade even the most diehard terminal users started to use graphical e-mail clients (most likely a web browser). Starting next year I’ll switch to HTML formatting, hoping that nobody will complain :-)
